When you open a movie with a vacationing family visiting a historical grave on a coastal hill that looks ready to collapse into the sea, you've handed the audience a pretty clear hint: Trouble's coming.
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The enigmatic, low-key and slow-burn romantic thriller "Frank & Lola" is impressive on a number of levels. It's the first feature from young director/writer Matthew Ross, it's blessed with a superlative cast - including Michael Shannon, Imogen Poots and Michael Nyqvist - and it features the kind of performance from Shannon that earned him notice before the likes of "Man of Steel" and "Boardwalk Empire" came calling.

Many weeks at the movies you search, fruitlessly, for protagonists with a few edges or a messy internal conflict or two. Too often the creators of those characters work from a place of commercial fear, not creative desire. They're nervous. They don't want anybody to dislike anybody for very long, especially their chief rooting interest. The function of the audience becomes simple: to root, root, root for the narrative equivalent of the home team.

If you feel you're not cynical enough about politics yet, "Miss Sloane" is a movie for you to discover. Jessica Chastain fires off a high-pressure Washington, D.C., thriller with subterfuge and backstabbing galore.

THE ACCOUNTANT. 3 stars. Crime thriller specialist Gavin O'Connor ("Hope and Glory"), delivers a slick, well-paced actioner based on the most ludicrous premise. Ben Affleck stars as an autistic accountant who also happens to be an expert sniper and martial arts master who is targeted by assassins after he finds financial irregularities at a powerful tech firm. Anna Kendrick is terrific as a geeky junior accountant who falls for the heroic CPA. With John Lithgow, J.K. Simmons, and Cynthia Addai-Robinson. 2 hr. 8 R (strong violence and profanity throughout) - Tirdad Derakhshani

The shock, grief and spotlight glare endured by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, in the days following her husband's 1963 assassination, was there for all to see. Yet who knows what she was truly thinking, feeling, screaming inside while wiping her husband's dried blood off her famous pink dress, or watching Lyndon B. Johnson taking the oath aboard Air Force One?

How much eye-rolling can one commit before needing an ophthalmologist for vision care? I think I must have come close watching "Office Christmas Party," which also triggered dangerous levels of griping bellyaches and suffocating sighs. The yuletide's second R-rated gross-out comedy proves that even when "Bad Santa 2" makes you think you've reached the bottom, you haven't yet hit the sub-basement.

When it comes to big, brassy studio comedies, a filmmaker can do worse than to gather the brightest, funniest stars, situate them in an odd, yet relatable situation and let 'em rip. That's exactly what directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck do with "Office Christmas Party," the delightfully debauched holiday desecration we need this year. Working from a screenplay credited to no less than six writers, the greatest strength of "Office Christmas Party" is its casting. If you've got fabulous weirdos Kate McKinnon and T.J. Miller in lead roles, there are bound to be more than enough laughs.

Eccentric, mysterious, larger than life - Warren Beatty and Howard Hughes have more than a few things in common. Beatty kicks off his Hughes-centric film, "Rules Don't Apply," with a quote attributed to the entrepreneur: "Never check an interesting fact." It's clear that he doesn't mean for this to be a biopic, but he runs into trouble assuming that his take on Hughes is interesting. Not only is it uninteresting, but the fixation on Hughes drags down the other, better parts of the film.

In relationships, and in music, it's all about the timing. So Damien Chazelle's "La La Land" is the perfect marriage of style and story - a good old fashioned musical about the ups and downs of one love story that struggles to stay in tempo. It's also a sealed-with-a-kiss love letter to the city where it's set, and the unabashed dreamers who inhabit the environs of Los Angeles.

The charming documentary "Harry Benson: Shoot First" introduces us to its subject - the photographer Harry Benson - first through his work, and then winds its way back to the beginning. It's a structure that echoes Harry's personal ethos: The work comes first. It's through Harry's photos, and through his friendships and interactions with his subjects, that you get to know the man, a photographer who has captured and made history through his lens.

Before the final credits roll in "Man Down," statistics are flashed on screen regarding the number of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with PTSD or who commit suicide. They are sobering, alarming figures and they deserve to preceded by a better movie than this handsomely crafted and ambitious but heavy-handed hodgepodge of ideas and styles.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy went from being an elegant celebrity to a figure of national tragedy, a vulnerable woman of strength in an era when strong women were not acknowledged. In "Jackie," Natalie Portman plays the role of America's most famous first lady in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. Directed by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain and produced by Darren Aronofsky (who guided Portman to an Oscar in "Black Swan"), it puts her center stage throughout the days following one of the most shocking events in U.S. history.

"Man Down" is an exasperating movie, stuffed with self-importance, short on drama, chained to the kind of crazy script that can only work if the film is crazy entertaining. Would that it were so simple.

Two people, who once loved each other and maybe still do, face each other on a sidewalk on a chilly New England afternoon. Years ago, they endured a tragedy that pulled them apart; now, upon a chance meeting, Randi (Michelle Williams) wants to make amends.

There are essentially two Casey Afflecks. There's the brooding melancholic, fraught with existential insecurity. And there's the touch-and-go tough guy picking fights with a frenzied smile that can be interpreted as either crazed or eerily calm. Affleck, 41, who has steadily built a heavyweight career over the past two decades, with much acclaim and a few misses, has moved between those contrasting twins like a pendulum.